Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

There was a lot of celebrating, when the verdict came in, and a lot of gnashing of teeth, as well. I fully expected, given the outcome, to be in the former group. I wasn’t. Nor was I in the latter group, either. Instead, I was somewhere in between.

I was genuinely upset, not because of any imagined “travesty of justice.” I’d been following the trial closely, reading reportage from dispassionate sources, and listening to analysis from those who know the law much better than I, so I understood the charges, was familiar with the testimony and arguments, and understood the basics of the jury’s instructions. While verdicts of guilty seemed likely, I was prepared for a hung jury, because, well, Trump.

But as the guilty verdicts came in, on count after count after count, each one hit me like a gut-punch. I had to sit down, hand over mouth, tears in my eyes. Surprised the hell out of me, if I’m honest.

Why? Because it felt right, it felt correct, but it also felt terribly wrong. Wrong in the sense of, we shouldn’t even be here, we shouldn’t have to do this. We should not have a major political party that is hell-bent on nominating for the presidency a person who is an adjudicated fraud, a proven sexual assaulter, and who now is convicted of using illegal means to cover up payments and avoid election finance laws and thereby hide what would have been, for some, a critical fact concerning his character.

The names Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and John Edwards—Democrats who suffered various political and civil fallout from their own sexual impropriety—came quickly to my mind. Why them, and why not this one? “It was a different time,” I hear some say. What? Was 2008 (for Edwards) a “different time?” As late as 2016, even after the Access Hollywood debacle, Trump’s Janus-faced surrogates were hounding Clinton for his decades-old antics.

Moreover, it was the nearly unanimous Republican response that felt wrong. No, more than just wrong. Dangerous. From the spectacle of the Red Tie Brigade that came downtown in lockstep to sit behind the accused in court, to the unison mouthing of ill-wrought talking points throughout the media, the country has been assaulted by words like “rigged,” “corrupt,” and “conflicted,” all designed to attack and weaken the judiciary and, critically, to erode our trust in the rule of law.

This is what the former Party of Law and Order has become. To defend the indefensible, they attack. They attack the judge, the judge’s family, the prosecution, and even the jury. The jury. Ordinary citizens, people like you and me, all deemed acceptable by lawyers from both sides, are attacked and slandered, doxxed and made to fear for their lives, simply because the defense’s rusty bucket of an argument didn’t raise a reasonable doubt in face of concrete evidence.

Now, a few days after, the sadness has not left me. I find little cause for celebration, as it has become clear that these thirty-four felony convictions will not make a difference to a large swath of the electorate. They have proven that Trump could, literally, shoot someone dead on 5th Avenue and he would not lose their vote.

And what does that say about us? As a country, as voters, as a population? What sort of respect could such a people enjoy? What sort of leadership could such a nation provide on the world stage? If America’s influence in the world is eroding, it is we who are doing the chipping away. If nations are crab-walking their way toward autocracy, it is in part because we are not bolstering our own democracy.

America has never been perfect. America will never be perfect. But we need to strive toward that goal, toward the “more perfect Union” of which our first Republican president spoke.

We have some little time left. There is a handful of months wherein I hope we, as a population, begin to see past our individual trees and toward the forest that we constitute.

My heart’s wish is that we succeed.

k

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